In the electronic industry, there is a need for high speed optical interconnects to pass signals from semiconductor chip to semiconductor chip and board to board in order to fully utilize the emerging capabilities of microprocessors, digital signal processors, etc. A Pentium 4™ microprocessor, for example, operates at 2.4 GHz but the data travels on a bus operating at only 400 MHz. The speed picks up again on an optical fiber telecommunication network. In accordance with to Moore's Law, single chip microprocessors can eventually achieve speeds of tens of teraflops. However, the speed limitation of current copper bus structures is limited at best to 10 GHz. High speed optical interconnect applications are primarily in computers (commercial and military), telecommunications switches, etc.
A number of problems need to be overcome to produce high performance manufacturable optical interconnects that can utilize the existing surface mount manufacturing infrastructure. In any product using optical interconnects there will be a large number of Silicon die. The reason for this is, at the present time, there is only one way to bring software into a system and that is with Silicon. Thus, in the present technology, economics require that any board with optical interconnects be surface mount compatible.
For distances of up to 500 meters, 850 nm emitters and detectors are currently the emitters and detectors of choice. For these distances, data rates far in excess of 1 GHz are readily achievable using glass optical multimode fiber. Optical glass fiber is preferred over organic optical fibers both from an optical power loss and achievable data rate.
It would be highly advantageous, therefore, to remedy the foregoing and other deficiencies inherent in the prior art.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved printed circuit board with embedded optical fiber for use as a high speed, high data rate interconnect.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a new and improved printed circuit board with embedded optical fiber that is highly manufacturable.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a new and improved printed circuit board with embedded optical fiber that is compatible with surface mounting techniques.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a new and improved printed circuit board with embedded optical fiber that is highly manufacturable.